Re: loading compiled files is extremely slow on DECstations

["Luke Tierney" <luke@umnstat.stat.umn.edu>]

The AKCL loader on most BSD unix platforms, including dec3100, uses 
ld -A to resolve references into the executable. On most systems ld -A
is reasonably fast. On the ULTRIX/MIPS combination it is absolutely
awful. It is easily a factor of 10 slower than on a sun 3/50. I do not
know why this is. (A wild guess is that it may be related to a bug in
the nlist system call that causes some 200K of memory to be dropped
per call -- this bug has been reported a number of times but I don't
think it has been fixed even in 4.2 -- not sure about that though.)
But ld -A is definitely the bottleneck. It is possible to write a
loader that does not use ld -A -- this has been done by the company
Statistical Science to support dynamic loading into the S statistical
system -- but I am not aware of any publically available code for
doing this.

luke